Bad Girls & Digital Collectives
In 2012, I still maintained my Tumblr, was writing my first big contemporary art essay on YouTube performance art, and started the Bad Girls Club (BGC) with Eden Redmond, Rebecca Hanley, and Kelly Brand, (later to be joined by kate holub). We all were young, defiant, femme, in a deeply committed relationship to the Internet, and ruminated discontent with an academic environment that didn't know how to engage with these critical aspects of work we, (before adopting the epithet of Bad Girls,) were making individually and privately.
Gross Crybaby Stuff (2014), Bad Girls Club
We researched the development of online feminist collectives; how they participate in ongoing movements to create spaces for and call out art scenes that systematically and structurally exclude, erase, and exploit women, non-white, and queer artists. The most well-known of these groups are the Guerrilla Girls, who operate under famous female artist pseudonyms on advertising campaigns calling attention to the lack of women artists in prestigious art institutions. VNS Matrix, another female collective, developed graphics, websites, programs and games to call out sexism in the Net-art scene.
Guerrilla Girls and VNS Matrix were like the grandmothers of BGC and what we wanted to do on a local scale to claim spaces and kick ass. A self-sustaining project outside of our university coursework, Bad Girls Club members supported each other through sharing studio space, constantly talking about our work and ideas with one another, and putting together exhibitions in an effort to engage our academic and local community.
When school was over, we still had hopes of keeping up with BGC, but the lack of shared physical space and individual lives scattering across the country made rebuilding the collective a series of fits and starts. Despite how seemingly ubiquitous, using online communication as a tool to do collective work requires a different type of organization and diligence than shared physical space requires. Immediate presence in the studio seems like more extension of self than checking e-mails and coordinating a doodle, and I found the latter somehow harder to get around to. Even the language I want to use to discuss how to work via the Web in a collective mode rings colder maybe, more computational and less romantic. It required an overhaul to my whole consideration of how to operate and moved me to consider the assumed roles that must be taken and how.
In the online incarnation of Bad Girls Club that became GRLRM, we were more intentionally thinking about how responsibility gets divided and redistributed. Where the work would form as we had the conversations and could touch and look at the materials, the work now must be largely theoretical and contextual, and the visibility of decision-making processes come to the forefront of realizing the work.
Being attached to this desire for physicality and tangibility––to showing up and just making the work happen as we talked––presents inherent difficulty in the shift toward a digitally-based collective mode. This aspect of organizing remotely asks one to crawl out of isolation from physical spaces where art is happening or not happening, to continuing to work on improving in the less-sexy stuff that keeps the mechanism running, (e-mails, blogging, bibliography building, etc.,) but also to put into motion a plan to fill the lack of tangibility. This is the spirit of collective work; to identify what's missing, name it, and work on making the space to fill it.
Collective thinking, organizing, and making seems utopian and hardly achieved, not because it necessarily is, but because it challenges and complicates the mechanisms of scarcity and competition that built our towns, cities, and roads. Not only does the collective mode require subversion of the capitalist cultural push toward competition and maintaining illusions of scarcity but also a subversion of the artist-genius stereotype of a single white male making from the depths of his inherently gifted soul.
The collective mode of working invokes ideals of equal distribution and responsibility, but it calls for flexibility; the reality that, from time to time, each member will carry shifting weights. No matter how shared the vision and communicated the approach, the strength in the collective is in the variety of perspectives, skills and abilities of its individual participants.
Gross Crybaby Stuff (2014), Bad Girls Club
Start an art collective with your friends. Maybe it starts in a small town Taco Bell, where you note the weirdness of physical space, the absurdity of the "paintings" on the wall, and how uncomfortable the pop-rock song on the Taco Bell-approved radio station makes you. Or maybe it starts in a conversation thread on a Facebook post someone tagged you in. Just take it, run with it, and don't forget to blind copy yourself and reply-all on the e-mails.
Start an art collective with your friends. You all might live in different towns, different states, different countries, but you all have pretty consistent Internet access that you mostly use to feel sore about how isolated you feel from a life that you had two years ago… Maybe this is really specific, but raise your hand if you are post-grad and floundering in a world that calls for more than two legs to stand on, let alone fancy shoes to dance in. Share your woes, and then make stuff to fix 'em.
Start an art collective with your friends. I've seen big gritty spaces rented on a few dimes. You just tend to have to use all your dimes for food and rent and bills and, oh yeah, those loan payments, too. So now you're down to just pennies, but if you have pennies, and your friends have a few pennies, you can really do something with that. Remember that consistent and slightly overwhelming Internet access? Some of those tools run for practically no pennies. It's 2017; if you want to go this route, either you or one of your friends has skills they should be compensated for, and when even one peach in the pie is a winner, the whole pie gets a blue ribbon on the right bite.
Start an art collective with your friends. This could just be two or more people that share a name and an idea. Musicians do this really well. Basically a band, but maybe doesn't make music or sound. Also not required, but highly encouraged: costumes and dance parties.
Start an art collective with your friends. Some work needs to be done in the depths of solitude–
no one can get inside your mind with you––but when you have people on your side who want to be your cheerleaders and your ass-kickers all rolled into one, you're more liable to get shit done.
via Olivia No (@aching2pupate), a 23 year old artist based in Chico, CA.
